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Friday, December 07, 2007

Mattogno and Graf: Reverse Logic

Author: Jonathan Harrison

Mattogno and Graf have a problem. They have decided that, instead of simply ignoring vast quantities of transport data (see Sanning), they will distort them. However, anyone who studies these data eventually finds trains running into the Reinhard camps from the East (e.g. Bialystok, Minsk, Lida, Vilnius and Lwow). To any logical person, this fact alone disproves the 'resettlement thesis'. How do Mattogno and Graf lie their way around this evident fact?

Mattogno/Graf's (M/G's) first approach to this issue is the blatant non-sequitur. 'Evidence A' is cited in support of totally unrelated 'Hypothesis B'. This is the equivalent of someone pointing to a barrel of apples as proof that there must be orange trees in the area. This is most apparent in Section 6 of Chapter VIII of their Treblinka screed, which begins with the claim:

The deportations of Jews to the east therefore took place in two stages: the Jews were first temporarily settled or lodged in transit camps and then deported farther east. In view of the paucity of existing documentation, we cannot determine with certainty what the final destination of this deportation was, but there exist various pieces of evidence, which make it possible for us to draw plausible conclusions.

In the absence of a 'final destination', M/G infer one by discussing a tiny sample of Dutch Jews who were selected for labour on the ramp at Sobibor. However, by definition, these labour selections were not 'resettlements'. The Jews quoted by M/G never set foot inside the USSR. Moreover, the labour camps cited in their testimony were to the west of Sobibor, so trains were going in the wrong direction to constitute 'deportations to the east'. M/G's own source, Danneker's statement of June 1942, clearly indicates that the 'east' was understood by the Nazis to mean the USSR:

For military reasons, an expulsion of Jews from Germany into the eastern deportation area can no longer take place during the summer.

We thus have a case of 'reverse logic' by M/G in which west and east are deliberately switched: a geographical and logical fallacy. Furthermore, the number of labour selections per transport in the cases cited by M/G was less than 5%. For example, Cato Polak was one of 42 people selected from a transport of 1105 Jews.

M/G's second distortion is to misrepresent a historical authority by cherrypicking a genuine historian's deportation data without giving its context. For example, in the case of Slovakian Jews, M/G claim that:

In an article published in 1992, Polish historian Janina Kielbon drew a close-to-complete picture of the deportation of Jews into the district of Lublin between 1939 and 1942.[703] We reproduce the data for 1942 in table form

M/G give the destinations as Trawniki, Izbica, 'Lublin' [Majdanek?], Lubartów, etc. What they fail to mention is that Kielbon's data indicated that these were merely temporary locations in which Jews underwent labour selection and those unfit for work were held in ghettoes for varying periods awaiting transport to the death camps, as shown here. See also the individual cases from the Majdanek State Museum shown here. M/G's technique here is therefore a snapshot fallacy. It takes a specific moment in a deportation, or one link from a transport chain, and uses this to obfuscate the full history of that deportation from its origin to its final location.

Thirdly, the most serious lie of all committed by M/G is to distort the ultimate fate of the people who were selected for labour:

It is characteristic that nearly all the Dutch Jews, who had been transferred from Sobibór to another camp, returned home by way of Auschwitz-Birkenau; instead of being liquidated as bearers of top-secret knowledge, they survived even this 'extermination camp.'

This can be shown to be false by examining one of M/G's own sources: Jules Schelvis's "Sobibor" study. Mattogno writes:

At Dorohucza, 5 km from Trawniki, was a labor camp where peat was cut. According to Schelvis, at least 700 Dutch Jews were transferred there directly after their arrival in Sobibór, but according to him only two of them are supposed to have survived the war.[765] There is certain knowledge of 171 of these persons - 147 men and 24 women - since they sent postcards home from Dorohucza.

M/G's hypocrisy towards Schelvis is telling. They accept his estimate of the number of Jews in the camp, which comes from the Judenrat in Amsterdam, but reject his findings on the number of survivors. Such hypocrisy is typical of M/G's quote-mining methodology.

From Dorohucza a total of 171 written messages (postcards) were received at the Judenrat in Amsterdam. The senders of 160 of these cards could be identified, together with the dates of their deportation. They were on 8 different transports. With these 8 transports, plus the first deportation of 10 - 13 March 1943, from which there were no survivors, the number of Dutch Jews put to work at Dorohucza, can be calculated as at least (9 x 80 + 1 =) 721.

The fate of these Jews is made clear by the same link:

Out of over 34,000 Dutch Jews deported from Westerbork to Sobibor, an estimated 1,000 were sent to the forced labour camps in the Lublin and Trawniki areas. One of those camps was the peat digging camp of Dorohucza. Sixteen of these Dutch Jews survived the war, 13 women and 3 men.

[...]

During the night of 3 November 1943 almost all Jews in the labour camps in the Lublin district (40 - 50,000) were shot. This massacre was conducted under the code name of Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival). In this operation the Jewish slave labourers in Dorohucza and Trawniki were murdered. It also meant the end of the work camps. In the digital ‘In Memoriam-Lezecher’ book are the names of 144 Dutch Jews who were murdered during Aktion Erntefest in Dorohucza, for administrative reasons with 30 November 1943 given as their date of death for administrative reasons. See the testimony of Robert Jührs.

This evidence alone is sufficient to confirm Schelvis's findings about the number of survivors. I am grateful to my friend Earldor for supplying this extract (Schelvis, "Sobibor", p.191):

Of the approximately 700 Dutch men who, upon arrival, were immediately transferred to labour camp Dorohucza to dig peat, only two survived the war. In the rest of the Lublin district, only thirteen women and one man were liberated - though not at Dorohucza or Lublin - after spending time at numerous other camps, relentlessly torn between misery, death and hope.

Finally, M/G set up a false dilemma, and a fallacious argument from incredulity, concerning the Jews in Galicia:

If, as official historiography has it, the establishment of these Jewish residential districts was aiming at concentrating the Jews in order to be able to liquidate them more easily, then why did the Belzec camp, allegedly founded for the purpose of just this liquidation, terminate its 'extermination activity' in December of 1942, although 161,514 Jews were still living in the district of Galicia on December 31, 1942?

The obvious answer to this argument from incredulity is that the Jews died by other means, such as being gassed at Sobibor:

After Belzec closed in December 1942, it is estimated that over 25,000 Jew from Lwow (Janowska Camp) and Stryj ghetto were sent to Sobibór and murdered.

In conclusion, therefore, although Mattogno and Graf present far more documentation than their fellow deniers, their approach to that documentation is no less fallacious and dishonest.